Reds dig deep for priceless win at the Palace
Crystal Palace 0 Liverpool 1, 5th October 2024
CRYSTAL PALACE 0
LIVERPOOL 1 (Jota 9)
Well Liverpool made very hard work of a very easy win which for 60 minutes was as serene as a sunshine filled stroll in a south London park perfectly epitomised by skipper Virgil van Dijk being described on TV commentary as “wearing a smoking jacket and sitting in an armchair”. But the Reds in the white and black rarely if ever truly threatened a second and decisive goal to add to the ninth minute strike from Diogo Jota and even before yet another hamstring injury accounted for Alisson Becker in the Liverpool goal they’d allowed a docile and powder puff Palace back into a game their timidity did not deserve and thankfully third choice goalkeeper Vítězslav Jaroš snuffed out the only chance on his goal from Eberechi Eze on 84 minutes and an easy victory and walk in the early October sunshine became a hard fought, priceless win.
I can easily summarise today’s events in a few short sentences. Between Eddie Nketiah’s disallowed goal after 22 seconds and Ismaïla Sarr finally making Alisson Becker work in the Reds goal in first half injury time the hosts were woeful and fearful of even putting in a tackle on a Liverpool team 1–0 in front and supremely in control. With both Diogo Jota and Mo Salah dropping into midfield the Reds simply overloaded the central third of the pitch and refused to let their hosts out of their own half of the field. The second half continued in the same vein until the introduction of Jean-Philippe Mateta from the Crystal Palace substitutes bench and now, whilst not exactly laying siege to the Liverpool goal, Palace had a physical presence and focal point in attack and someone to prise and pull apart the Reds central defensive duo of Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konaté. Following Alisson Becker’s unfortunate injury, Vítězslav Jaroš made a routine save to deny Eberechi Eze and the aforementioned easy win was achieved, but in a far more stressful manner than anyone could have imagined after an hour’s play.
Today’s game was so routine in fact that I somewhat wistfully re-told my tall tales of visiting Selhurst Park in my match going days to my totally disinterested son sitting beside me and indulging my strange fetish for football he simply doesn’t get. So I made him laugh with stories of watching a rather rotund man leaving a local chip shop that used to be located at the corner to the away end and, missing a vital step when leaving the shop, comically throwing his fish and chips high into the sky (and onto the stone cold pavement when the contents returned to planet earth!) that one end of Crystal Palace’s ground used to be called the “Sainsbury’s End” (after the large supermarket that used to dominate this particular part of south London) and in 1997 being locked out of a night game (and eventual 2–1 defeat to ground-sharing Wimbledon) when 17 year old Michael Owen made a goal scoring debut for the Reds. Warming to my task I regaled my still disinterested in football son with further tales of returning home from a game in the mid 1990’s with a match programme almost entirely covered with autographs from the Wimbledon and Liverpool teams of the day, taking my warm hearted friend Gareth to a game even earlier in that same decade and he declared that watching a game with me was “like watching a game with a football coach”, as well as the ignominy of being one of many thousands of Reds frozen to the bone on the away end when Liverpool hit yet another nadir under manager Graeme Souness and lost to Wimbledon on penalties in the early rounds of the League Cup in front of just 10,000, another freezing day when the only entertainment on offer at Selhurst Park was the large congregation of school children who sang “Come On Liverpool” throughout a dull and dismal goal less draw and even my final trip to this south London mecca of football excellence when, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Liverpool beat a woeful and still ground sharing Wimbledon by 2 goals to 1 and the Reds double goal scorer that day had, and presumably still has, the middle name of Ivanhoe.
Yes, the game was so pedestrian and unexciting that I wove tall if true tales of seeing the Mighty Reds of Liverpool play ten times at Selhurst Park in a dozen or so years and (a) rarely if ever watched them play Crystal Palace (b) I cling to the claim to fame of being among a small number of Reds seeing them dumped out of the League Cup in one of the least auspicious times for the team and club and under the darkest of footballing clouds and (c) I also have a good pub quiz question tucked into my back pocket as to which Liverpool player has the middle name Ivanhoe!
Memories and tall tales eh? The train ride home after being locked out was a quiet affair too I can tell you. Almost as quiet as when I returned home a decade earlier from a game that was postponed even before a ball was kicked due to a waterlogged pitch. The opposition on both occasions ten years apart?
Wimbledon.
Shall I tell you about watching a Reds game at Plough Lane in 1986 from the window of a toilet as the terrace was dangerously overcrowded, or shall we return to the present day and see what the boss thought of it all today?
Arne’s Afterword
“Alisson is our clear number 1, he is the best goalkeeper in the world. So, it’s always a blow when he gets injured, for himself but also for us as a team. But the positive thing for the team is — and it’s not only in the goalkeeper position but almost in every position — that we have a second option that is also really good. And Caoimhin has already shown that so it is quite clear then that he is the number 2. So Caoimhin is the number 2 and did really well. It’s very pleasing to see that even our third goalkeeper — because Caoimhin was sick yesterday and today of course — can have an impact on our results”.
“I think you saw today how much we controlled the first 60 minutes. Then we had for 15 to 20 minutes a difficult spell. And then in the last 10 minutes we took control again. We took control by having a very good build-up and that helps to also tire — I don’t know if that’s the way you say it — but tire the opponents because they have to defend a lot, they have to run a lot to make it difficult for us. And then the work-rate our attackers and midfielders put in is also extraordinary, and that combination with a few other things — because it’s also the quality of the centre-backs and the goalkeeper — leads to so many clean sheets”.
Thanks for reading. I often lament that despite my hundreds of articles here I rarely if ever make contact with genuine Liverpool fans so, if that is you, please say a hearty hello and, whilst you’re here, can I interest you in these spectacularly good self-published books on the Mighty Reds?
"A final word from The Boss" - link to Amazon
"Chasing the Impossible and a Sword of Damocles" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.